Questioning about time

What is time? How can a human understand time?
Simply perceiving it, time is a mere state of nature. Like St. Augustine formulated it: If you ask me what time is, I will not know what to answer. If not, I know time.
So you uqestion upon it. And you leave the simple perception. You are inquiring the concept of time; your mind and conscience are trying to seriously task themselves. A manifold human thinking history is coming off – how the ancient Greeks conceived time, how other philosophers and scientists did ( I’m pondering here over Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Newton, Leibniz or Einstein for instance).The ancient Greek thinkers saw time in two ways, both of them having as reference mark the number, the measure, the duration. But while one imagines time within its measure (the very human way of time, human, all too human (Menschliches, Allzumenschliches – as Friedrich Nietzsche’s title of the famous book), the other sees the absolutness of an „exterior“ self-suficient time, irrespective of measures, numbers, riminding of Jean Tardieu’s poem: To go forward, I spin around myself/ Cyclone lived by stillness...What I find noteworthy in the poem is the powerful image it creates: both time previously described forms. It’s like time itself would be the subject who speaks. Time‘s linearity is thus circular, but this is the right way; and the stillness lives the cyclone...
What do you say? I'm looking forward to your ideas and points of view!
IrinaMay